pho: View and annotate multiple images

pho is a lightweight program for viewing large numbers of images quickly, rotating or deleting some, and making notes about what to do with each image -- for instance, for going through hundreds of images after uploading them from a digital camera.

Why another image viewer? Surely there are plenty of those?

I used to use xv for paging through images -- it's quite a good viewing program -- but it had a few features which annoyed me. For example, it creates a directory called .xvpics in every directory it touches; and if an image has to be resized to fit the screen, and after that you save it (perhaps after rotating it), it saves at the smaller size and boom, there goes your high-res image.

But, more important, there were a few extra things I needed. During image triage, I need to be able to do a few things quickly:

• Rotate images by +/- 90 degrees, and remember the rotations.
• Delete bad images.
• Copy a few of the best horizontals to my Backgrounds (wallpaper) directory.
• Note which images I might want to put on a web page (after resizing).

Pho can now delete images on disk, but it can't save rotated images yet (I'm working on it; I need to integrate code to read and save the EXIF info first.) I use my imagebatch scripts for that.

Pho can read any format supported by gdk-pixbuf. I haven't found a list of those formats anywhere, but it seems to be substantial. The only format I've hit so far that it doesn't read is photocd. I usually use hpcdtoppm for PhotoCDs.

How to use pho

space

Go to next image.

backspace, -

Go to previous image.

r, t, right-arrow

Rotate right (clockwise).

R, T, l, L, left-arrow

Rotate left (counter-clockwise).

up-arrow

Rotate 180 degrees.

d

Bring up a delete dialog (another d deletes the file)

i

Show information about the image.

0-9

Add this image to the appropriate list.

f

Toggle in and out of "full screen mode".

q

Quit.

Dependencies: pho uses the gdk-pixbuf library for reading, scaling, and displaying images. So you will need gdk-pixbuf installed in order to run pho. To compile it, you will also need gdk-pixbuf-devel. You may need to edit the Makefile if your system has gdk-pixbuf installed in different place from my system (sorry, no autoconf yet). Also included is a little xlib program, xpho, which is mostly interesting as an example of how to use gdk_pixbuf_xlib.

As far as I know, gdk-pixbuf is Unix only, so pho won't work on Windows or Mac machines. (But you're welcome to use the skeleton of the program and insert your own platform specific image drawing code.)

latest pho source tarball (includes man page)
pho binary for Linux i386 (compiled on Redhat 7.3)

I haven't made an RPM or deb for pho yet; if there really is someone besides me and close friends using pho, and you'd like to see a different format made available, please tell me.

If you like pho, or if you think it's promising but there's some feature it really needs ... let me know!

Changelog

8/13/2002, Pho 0.7:

Put image name in titlebar; prompt after last image before quitting; add fullscreen mode.

7/28/2002, Pho 0.6.1:

Fixed a bug with printing a note set on the last image.

7/21/2002, Pho 0.6:

Code cleanup, change the handling of the notes structures.

7/21/2002, Pho 0.5.1:

Fix a bug where image rotations were wrong when going backward.

7/11/2002, Pho 0.5:

Add delete dialog, and really delete files on disk.

7/3/2002, Pho 0.4:

Fixed a bug with gif rotation.

7/1/2002, Pho 0.3:

Rename yass to pho, add info dialog.

6/28/2002, Yass 0.2

Some added features; add manual and make install target.

6/24/2002, Yass 0.1:

First release.